“Circumferential Movements: A Collection of Autobiographical Novels by Sergey Dovlatov”

Superb autobiography

Joseph Brodski (1940 – 1996), the Russian poet who had to leave the Soviet Union in 1972 and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987, said of his fellow writer Sergei Dovlatov that those books he – Brodsky – always wrote in one go read, so much did Dovlatov’s style grip him. Brodsky was a poet, Dovlatov (Ufa 1941 – New York 1990) a story writer and novelist, but otherwise their lives are similar. Both were devoted to the city that was then still called Leningrad, both had problems with the authorities, especially with the censorship that systematically blocked the publication of their literary work in the Soviet Union, both emigrated to the United States – Dovlatov in 1978 – and both died young. Dovlatov, a quarter drinker, died of heart failure during an alcoholic episode on a sweltering New York day. Dovlatov held a job in New York as the editor of a Russian-language newspaper aimed at the community of Russian emigrants in the US, and wrote through a body of work of stories and novels. He broke through to a non-Russian audience then The New Yorker published his stories in translation.

In the Netherlands, Pegasus Publishers previously published some of Dovlatov’s novels in translation, more recently two of his novels were published by Vleugels Publishers, and Van Oorschot is now unpacking with Circumferential movementsa binding of 558 pages with four novels, Compromise, The of usthe two parts of craft in Branch. All translated by Robbert-Jan Henkes, who also provided annotations and explanations.

As a novelist, Dovlatov practiced what Henkes, with a nice invention, calls ‘autobiographical fiction’. The novels deal with episodes from the life of an I-figure strongly resembling Dovlatov, sometimes baptized Dalmatov or something similar by the author. For example, the main part of Compromis is Dovlatov’s stay in the Estonian capital Tallinn, where he works as an editor of a Russian-language newspaper and mainly fails, as a result of his powerlessness and unwillingness to create a purely lebensbejahend, one-dimensional, ideologically correct fantasy image in his pieces. as reality.

The of us is Dovlatov’s very idiosyncratic family tree research. In craft the first part deals with his systematic unsuccessful attempts to get his literary products published; in the second part about the hilarious developments surrounding the establishment of a Russian-language newspaper in New York by a group of emigrants. In Branch Dovlatov confronts past and present: the I participates as a reporter in Los Angeles at a conference of Russian émigré literati. Suddenly his first wife appears there, with whom he once experienced a short, but stormy marriage.

Of course you also read Dovlatov for the story, but you mainly read him for how he writes. There is no language that can be so amusingly – and rudely – abused and mocked as Russian, and Dovlatov lives up to that reputation. His sentences are concise and seldom long and they do justice to the laconic character that characterizes his characters, often good people, but most unlucky, who have all been forced by circumstances to be corrupted in one way or another. Which, I think, also touches the core of Dovlatov’s problematic relationship to the reality of the Soviet system. That required not (so much) blind faith in the dogmas of Soviet communism as a willingness to jettison one’s personal moral integrity in exchange for the services of the state, utterly corrupt in all its bureaucratic ramifications. Dovlatov hardly mentions constitutionally guaranteed freedom rights and democratic structures when deciding to emigrate. He makes no explicit ideological and systemic criticism. But he talks – in anecdotes that are as gloomy as they are tasty – about how he repeatedly hits his nose in his attempts to get something published. It often turns out that it is not (so much) the style and/or content of his manuscript that leads to a refusal, as that he does not show that he is willing to sacrifice a single piece of his literary integrity to conformism. To lie? To get a text published? Of course, a writer may write untruths, but not on commission or because of censorship. Only “a non-profit falsehood is not a lie, it is poetry.”

To perfect his style, Dovlatov imposed a restriction on himself that no words could start with the same letter in a sentence. This is considerably less difficult to achieve in that language than in Dutch, partly thanks to the articleless Russian, but still. Incidentally, it gave Henkes quite a few headaches to do justice to that element of Dovlatov’s style as much as possible. As far as I can judge, Henkes’ translation deserves the qualification excellent.

These four novels complete the translation of the octet, together Dovlatov’s autobiographical novel work.

Hans van der Heyde

Sergey Dovlatov – Circumferential Movements – four novels.Translation Robbert-Jan Henkes. Van Oorschot, Amsterdam. 558 pp. €39.50.